Human Transit

great american "metro areas"

When any US study refers to "metro areas," they probably mean this:

These are all photos of US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs).  Many, many national studies -- most recently the Brookings study on "transit and jobs in metropolitan America" -- mean "MSA" when they say "metro area." 

MSAs, however, are aggregations of counties. They're the red patches on this map:

Counties come in all kinds of weird sizes, and are usually irrelevant to anyone's lived experience of a metro area.  Eastern US counties are mostly small, so MSAs there are often credible.  But western counties are often huge, so MSAs have to be huge too.  Almost two-thirds of California's land area is a metro area by this defintion, including the "Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA," which contains most of the Mojave Desert.  Metro areas in America include the Grand Canyon, the Cascade wilderness areas east of Seattle and Portland, a big chunk of the Everglades, and the vast Voyageurs wilderness of northern Minnesota, accessible only by canoe or snowmobile. 

So when the Brookings Institution, for example, declares that Riverside-San Bernardino is doing poorly on transit travel times to work, they're referring partly to travel times from Needles to Riverside, a distance of about 230 miles (370 km) over open desert.  They're also implying that there ought to be intense transit service between the Riverside area and the Palm Springs area, even though locals largely experience these as two different metro areas.  (Their centroids are 50 miles apart, the towns between are mostly semi-rural in nature, and if those facts don't convince you, there's also a 10,000-foot mountain in the way.)  What matters to the MSA is that the two metro areas are in the same counties as Riverside-San Bernardino, so nothing else about their lived geography can possibly matter.

A deeper problem arises when all the demographic statistics of an MSA are declared to be features of a "metro area."  Consider the Visalia-Porterville MSA, site of the top photo above.  The MSA, identical to Tulare County, has a 2000 population of 368,000.  All of these people are counted in MSA-based statistics about "metropolitan America," but only about half of them live in a city over 50,000.  The other half live in much smaller towns and in rural areas.  (The rural areas also have high labor needs, so they support semi-mobile populations, validly picked up by the census, that have no relationship to any city.)  A fundamentally rural and small-town culture, indistinguishable from many other entirely rural counties, is being described as metropolitan whenever the Visalia-Porterville MSA is referenced as part of generalizations about "metropolitan America."  This culture is not just small and easily dismissed statistical "noise."  It's half of the population of the MSA.

This is one of those absurdities that we're trained to think of as eternal.  Many weird and misleading boundaries (e.g. some counties, city limits etc) are going to persist even if they have no emotional or cultural meaning, simply because influential people are attached to them as a matter of self-interest.  But how many people are really attached in this way to MSAs?  And is it really impossible, with all the increasingly detailed information in the census, to describe metro areas in a more subtle and accurate way?

Even if we're stuck with them, is it really appropriate to keep saying "metro area" when you mean MSA?  It's statistically convenient given how much data is organized by these crazy units.  But are you really misleading people about what a metro area is?

In the sense that usually matters for urban policy, "metro area" means "the contiguous patch of lights that you can see at night from an airplane or satellite."  You can approximate this with census blocks, as Mees and others do.  Their technical definition is something like "any agglomeration of contiguous census blocks that all have a non-rural population or employment density."  Census blocks are small enough that they can aggregate in a way that follows the geography, connecting what's really connected and separating what's really separate.  Defining "metro area" in that way would finally mean what ordinary people mean by "metro area."

What's more, it would really cut down on bear attacks in "metropolitan America."

Photos:

1. Kaweah Gap, Sequoia National Park, Visalia-Porterville MSA, California.  Credit: Davigoli, Wikipedia.
2. Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Las Vegas-Paradise MSA, Nevada.  (my photo)
3. Duck Lake and High Sierra, John Muir Wilderness, Fresno MSA, California.  (my photo)
4. Matanuska Glacier, Anchorage MSA, Alaska.  Credit: Elaina G, via Google Earth.
   
5. Melakwa Lake, Alpine Lakes Wilderness, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue MSA, Washington.  Credit: Wikipedia.
6. Joshua trees in open desert southwest of Las Vegas, Las Vegas-Paradise MSA, Nevada.  (my photo)
   

 

 

 

downtown networks: the oblique approach

How important is it that the transit services converging on downtown all go right to the core of downtown's demand?  In a city with a strong downtown, a reactive, demand-driven view of planning will add more and more transit into downtown as demand requires, because the loads are always highest there.  But sometimes, it can make sense to avoid the center of downtown, or to slide past downtown along one edge.

Zach Shaner's new proposal for the core area of Seattle is a nice example.   (Click to enlarge and sharpen, or see JPG here:  JPG )

You don't have to know Seattle to follow this.  The core of downtown is the little shaded box on the left, where LINK light rail will be in a subway and other frequent buses will run on the surface.  Most of the rest of the map area is also dense, so this is an area where you would expect a high-frequency grid to be possible, easily serving trips from anywhere to anywhere. 

But the map area is also ferociously hilly, so fitting the classical grid to this terrain has always been a struggle.  Still, Zach suggests that once the LINK light rail extension northward opens, ending at the University of Washington just off the north edge of the map, something remarkably gridlike might come into being. 

Several of the design principles that I often advocate are at work here.  First, Zach has focused on running on the fewest possible streets so as to provide the maximum possible frequency.  Second, he's mapped both the existing and proposed networks so that you can see this frequency difference.

But he's also provided a nice example of the oblique approach to downtown, which is a way of balancing the distributive quality of a grid with the need to serve downtown's concentration of demand. 

Look at the magenta line coming from the southeast.  It's Line 7, now the single busiest bus line in Seattle.  Off the map to the south, it extends about 5.5 km (3.4 mi) onward through dense, old, and historically low-income areas of the Rainier Valley.  It touches the rail line at Mount Baker station, just inside the map, but it flows onward into the city, currently going right through downtown.

Zach proposes instead that Line 7 approach downtown but then bypass it just to the east, via Boren Avenue.  He would do this to create a new crosstown (north-south) opportunity to reach dense north parts of downtown (including the South Lake Union redevelopment area and Seattle Center, which is right where Line 7 exits the map on the west edge) without going right through downtown's heart.

What would the dense downtown ridership of Line 7 do?  Well, some of it would transfer to LINK where the two lines touch at the south edge of the map.  Others, depending on exactly where in downtown they were going, might transfer to any of several very frequent east-west services crossing the line.  But many who now seem to be going downtown would reveal that they're really going elsewhere.  This is the key.

Line 7 ridership shows massive boarding and alighting downtown, and downtown is certainly an overwhelming destination.  But you always have to ask if the concentration of downtown boardings is evidence of what people want or what the current network structure requires of them.  People going to the dense and fast-growing areas on the north edge of downtown will find Zach's revision a dramatic improvement.  Many others may be going still further north, to anywhere in the northern half of the city, in fact; they currently have to go through downtown to make their connections, because that's where their bus goes, but they could make the same connections to northward services from the revised Line 7, often with quite a savings of travel time.

Obviously, I don't have the data to validate exactly how many people are in each of these categories.  I'm not even advocating Zach's design, but I do think it illustrates an important design concept, one that you will never think of if you're focused entirely on where your current ridership patterns seem to be leading.

Many major cities are facing unmanageable volumes of buses squeezing through a tight downtown.  Sydney, where I lived for five years, has a remarkably similar predicament to Seattle's.  One solution, in Sydney as in Seattle, is to let go of the idea that radial services aimed generally for downtown need to go right through the very center of it.  If there is a sufficient diversity and richness of connection opportuntiies for reaching various parts of downtown, you can often create a better design by sliding past downtown obliquely, as Zach proposes that Line 7 should do. 

I don't advocate or oppose Zach's design, but I do think it's a nice illustration of how to fit the "everywhere to everywhere" network design principles (such as the high frequency grid) to a very difficult terrain.  It also raised some interestingly contrasting comments from different Seattle transit experts who've seen it; more on that in another post.

UPDATE:  Zach explains his proposal to the Seattle transit community here.

are toll lanes "congestion pricing"?

Congestion pricing should really be called decongestion pricing.  Its purpose is to provide an alternative to sitting in congestion for people and businesses willing to pay the fair price for the scarce road space required.  The toll isn't a tax, it's a price for driving in an uncongested lane.   So if your toll lane is still congested, you're not doing (de)congestion pricing, and your results say nothing about whether it's a good idea.

In Crosscut, former Washington State Secretary of Transportation Douglas MacDonald lays out the issue today as it applies to Seattle area freeways.  There, likely toll lanes are already High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes permitting cars with two or more people.  Everyone knows that if the goal is free flow, this minimum has to go up to three whenever congestion requires it. 

When carpool lanes were first established there was a vigorous “now or later” debate about the right limit for the carpool privilege: two-to-a-car, or three-to-a-car? Pragmatism won. Except for three-to-a-car from the start on the Evergreen Point Bridge, carpool lanes were introduced with the two-to-a-car rule.

Everyone involved at the time believed that later the rule would have to be, and could be, changed to three-to-a-car. Everyone was entirely up-front about this expectation. The trigger would be the growth of traffic in the carpool lanes to the point where access would have to be cut back so that they would still work.

Didn't happen. Good luck today with that ticking time bomb for a political revolt. The moment of truth is at hand, at least for some carpool lane segments. But no one today seriously talks about outright banishing the two-to-a-car carpoolers to thin out jammed carpool lanes.

I defer to Doug's knowledge of Washington State politics, but I do resist the apathy-inducing hyperbole of the phrase "no one talks seriously."  Is "everyone" sure that changing carpool lanes to 3+ would trigger a political revolt if it also caused people to start getting to work on time?  Especially if the state also put some effort into casual carpool facilities at the same time?  Especially if transit riders (in buses in the same lanes) began getting to work on time too?  I wonder.  I can see it would be controversial.  I can see it would take some time.  But can no one "seriously" discuss it?

basics: expertise vs. activism

The planning professions work in a grey zone between expertise and activism, and managing these competing impulses is one of our hardest tasks.

As a transit planning consultant, I don't worry much about being perceived as an advocate of transit in general.  Experts in any field are expected to believe in its importance.  But I do try to keep a little distance between my knowledge about transit and the impulse to say "You should do this."  A good consultant must know how to marry his own knowledge to his client's values, which may lead him to make different recommendations than he would do as a citizen, expressing his own values.

Often, I use this blog and its comments to refine my own thinking about transit in the abstract.  This is part of how I cultivate my own expertise, but it is easy to mistake what I say for activism.  When I say, for example, that some of the widespread claims about the superiority of rail over buses are cultural feedback effects, I'm not thinking like an activist or advocate; I'm thinking theoretically, like a philosopher.  To me, this is a crucial skill for a consultant who's going to have to marry his client's values with his own expertise. 

Philosophical or scientific training attunes you to the difference between prescription (telling people what they should do) and description (describing reality as it appears to be).  In their purest form, prescription is the job of ethics, while description the job of science and metaphysics.  A great deal of human speech, especially political speech, is a mixture of description and prescription, often one pretending to be the other.

In the planning world, prescription is the job of citizens, leaders, and advocates, while description is the work of professional experts like me.  Obviously, this has to be a conversation.  The expert has to ask the community to clarify its values based on the actual tradeoffs presented by reality, and the community has to respond.  And as that goes on, both sides need to be clear about their roles, and respect the role of the other.

Partly because of my science and philosophy training, I tend to police the prescription-description boundary in my own thinking, and dwell in the space of pure description more than many people do -- certainly more than most activists do.  A lot of regular readers of HT share that training and that inclination, and some don't.

For a critique of the futility of living your whole life in this descriptive mode, watching and describing the world but never doing anything, see Shakespeare's Hamlet.  But the opposite is also futile.  An ethical system devoid of curiosity about objective reality devolves into pure egotism, such as that of the tyrants currently falling across the Middle East.  Tyrants -- whether they lead a nation or an office clique -- are people who sift reality and see only what suits their ethical narrative (which, at that point, is really an egotistical narrative) and who forge echo chambers of people who help each other do that.  At the core of the tyrant's stance is a childlike egotistical wail: "Why doesn't everyone do as I say?  I see so clearly what needs to be done!"

And yes, everyone has an inner tyrant, including me.  I try to describe that tendency in myself, so that while it will always be in the room of my mind it's not usually able to set the room on fire.  In fact, that's exactly why I'm so careful about not letting my descriptive thinking turn too quickly into prescriptions.

Streetcars, for example.  Nowhere in this blog have I said that cities shouldn't build streetcars if they are sure that they want streetcars.  Some streetcar advocates hear me saying that because they are dividing the world into pro-streetcar and anti-streetcar camps, and I've said things about streetcars that don't sound like enthusiastic advocacy.  I've made some descriptive observations about problems raised by the American streetcar revival movement, and I've also noticed situations in which streetcars are inferior to buses in their ability to actually get you where you're going, like this one:

I would like people to know about these issues so that they make better decisions about what to advocate and why.  That doesn't mean I want them to decide not to build streetcars, but it may mean, for example, that in deciding whether to support a streetcar, you might need to care about whether it will be in mixed traffic.  It may also mean being very clear, when you're advocating a streetcar, that you're not getting anything faster or more reliable than a bus can be.  Again, I say this not because I think cities should or shouldn't be building streetcars, but because you shouldn't be deluded about what you're buying, and what purposes it will really serve.

I have vivid memories of San Francisco Transportation Authority meetings in the early 1990s when the Third Street light rail was under debate.  Activists from the neighborhood had turned out in droves to support the line, but when you actually listened to their testimony, some were talking about "we need rapid transit," while others were saying "we need rail to stop in every block where it will strengthen our businesses."  I knew, as an expert, that while this whole crowd appeared to be on the same side of the issue at hand, half of them were not going to get what they thought they were advocating.  They were not going to get a project that served their values.

I may also point out that if you think purely about "extending your rail network" as though your bus network is irrelevant, you can do serious damage to your existing transit system.  For example, in a high-frequency grid, if you break one line of the grid into three consecutive pieces because you want rail in the middle but buses on the extremeties, you may suddenly force many new connections to a degree that could quite possibly will reduce the overall level of mobility in the city.   That thought is relevant, for example, to several cities' streetcar plans, and to the Crenshaw light rail line in Los Angeles, and to the Gold Coast light rail line (at least its first phase) in Australia.

And yet, sometimes I do sound like an advocate -- about transit in general, about protecting transit from traffic, and about congestion pricing.  Am I just falling off the wagon when I say those things?

Well, all scientists (by which I mean broadly "people who try to describe without prescribing") have this problem.  Sometimes the scientific work of description discovers that something needs to be done if we want to survive and prosper:  Banning DDT, addressing carbon emissions, correcting perverse pricing signals, even building a transit line.  If you've followed any of the conversation around climate change, you know how uncomfortable trained scientists can be when they're required to speak prescriptively.  Their credibility (not just to their profession but also to themselves) has depended precisely on not doing that.  It's like telling a recovering alcoholic that after all the disciplined work of recovery he's done, the future of humanity now requires that he start drinking again, just a little.

All I can say is that I feel that discomfort and try to manage it, by marking, as clearly as I can, when I'm prescribing and when I'm describing.  And there are also issues (like climate change) where, quite frankly, practically all experts seem to know what needs to be done to achieve the outcomes that everyone seems to want.  I feel that way about congestion pricing.  It's just not that hard to explain, to a reasonable person who's familiar with the idea of supply and demand, that as a motorist you are going to pay for scarce road space in either time or money, and that it's not unreasonable for some people to choose to spend money to save time. 

I do what I can to distinguish between description and prescription when I'm writing.  But frankly, we all need to do the same work when listening.  If your first contact with transit politics is in the context of a fight about whether or not to build a particular rail line, you're going to hear prescriptive voices on both sides, citing data that's been selected to match their point of view.  You're also going to hear descriptive voices treated as prescriptive -- which is how some streetcar advocates perceive my comments about streetcars.  One of the most basic disciplines that you can cultivate, as an advocate or leader, is to try to hear descriptive information as descriptive.  This may require you to consciously suppress or bracket the emotional reaction you have, as an advocate, when you first hear it.

Really, none of what I've written about streetcars is about streetcars, except insofar as the American streetcar revival movement is a excellent example of a descriptive point that seems important to me.  The point is that "it's possible to spend a lot of money on transit lines that don't improve anyone's mobility."  I'm not saying you shouldn't do that.  I am saying that before you that, you should understand this point, so that you're sure that the line you support does what you want it to do. 

That's what responsible experts do: they help you implement your values.

bicycle vs transit problems

Bicycles have always had an anxious relationship with local-stop street-running transit, both bus and streetcar.  On a street without separate bike lanes, bikes and local-stop transit tend to end up sharing the "slow" traffic lane -- typically a lane that's either next to the curb or next to a row of parked cars.  The difficulty lies not just in the obvious ability of rail tracks to throw a cyclist, but more generally in the fact that many cyclists like to move at something close to the average speed of local-stop transit -- generally 10-20 mph.  With buses at least, the pattern is often for a local bus and a cyclist to "leapfrog," passing each other over and over, an uncomfortable and mildly risky move for both parties. 

Streetcars are much less likely to pass a cyclist than a bus is, and this, come to think of it, may be one of the many little reasons that streetcars often end up being slower than buses when you control for other differences (in right of way, fare handling, signaling, enforcement, etc).  Cyclist friends have often told me that they prefer cycling alongside streetcars rather than buses becuase streetcars don't make surprising lateral moves.  This is true, though of course the lateral motion of buses is a normal part of how they get through traffic, and how they often keep moving in situations where a streetcar would get stuck.

Mia Birk has a good article today arguing that bicycles and streetcars can be friends.  So far, though, the only examples she cites of really successful bicycle-transit integration are from streets where there's plenty of space to separate the two modes, such as Portland's King/Grand couplet.  She's involved now in a consulting team looking at how streetcars will interact with cyclists along a proposed line on Seattle's Broadway, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with. 

Birk is clear that the basic design of the starter streetcar lines in Portland in Seattle -- operation in the right-hand (slow) lane next to a row of parked cars -- didn't provide good options for cyclists needing to avoid the hazard of the streetcar tracks.  She wants to see better separation, but when looking at a dense urban street like Seattle's Broadway, it's hard to see how they'll deliver that without undermining either on-street parking or pedestrian circulation.  She notes one situation in Portland (14th & Lovejoy) where the streetcar-cyclist conflict was arguably resolved at the pedestrian's expense:

... and she's clear that this isn't the outcome she's after.  (This idea of a bike lane that passes between a transit stop and the sidewalk is common in the Netherlands.  It can work well as long as there's ample sidewalk width.  It's less nice in situations like this one where the remaining sidewalk is constrained.)

If I sound a little cynical about the prospects for harmony between local-stop transit and cyclists, it's because this is a geometry problem, and geometry tends to endure in the face of even the most brilliant innovation.  The examples in Mia's post seem to confirm that if the street is wide enough, it's easy to separate cycles and transit, but that if it isn't, it isn't. 

When the problem is this simple, it's not hard to reach a point where you're sure you've exhausted all the geometric possibilities.  At that point, you to make hard choices about competing goods, producing something that all sides will see as a compromise.  Hoping for new innovative solutions can become a distraction at that point, since no innovation in human history has ever changed a fact of geometry. 

Finally, if a streetcar ever does go down Seattle's Broadway, it had better be compatible with buses as well.  Broadway is an important link in the frequent transit network, with lines that extend far beyond the local area and thus make direct links that a starter streetcar line cannot replace.  What will happen to these buses?  If they share the streetcar lane, what will their role be in the streetcar-bicycle dance?

_{Photo: Mia Birk}

seattle: a new frequent network map

The populist frequent-network mapping continues.  Here's very clear frequent network map for Seattle, showing where you can get to if you don't like waiting. It's by Oran Viriyincy via Seattle Transit Blog. He discusses his process here.

If you want to understand how transit works (and sometimes doesn't) in Seattle, you need a map like this on your wall. 

seattle: quick notes on "rapid ride"

Seattle's main transit agency, King County Metro, is beginning to roll out a rapid bus product called Rapid Ride.  As described by their website, its key mobility features, apart from frequency, are a rapid stopping pattern (stopping once every km or so) and all-door boarding and alighting, using a Proof of Payment fare system. 

The last point is especially important because there as been so much resistance to all-door boarding in the North American and Australasian bus operations worlds, even as it becomes routine in Europe.  I've always thought that the ritual of front-door boarding, which includes paying the driver and often feeling judged or inspected by him or her, is one of the most offputting aspects of bus-riding, especially for people who aren't used to it every day. 

In the last 30 years of light rail and streetcar development, many cities have settled into a practice of requiring fare payment to the driver on buses, while allowing all-door boarding and alighting, with roving fare inspection, on rail.  This has created an often subliminal but powerful difference in "feel" that has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of rail vs bus technology.

I also like the choice Rapid Ride has made about station architecture.  The shelters are distinctive but not flashy.  They are easy to recognize, even amid the visual noise of a suburban commercial strip. They are clearly more than conventional bus stops, yet not so expensive that they would be hard to extend consistently across a network. 

seattle: notes on the "snowpocalypse"

As Seattle moves into the recriminations phase on last week's snowstorm, locally known as the "snowpocalypse," let's put some things in perspective:

Seattle has a particular vulnerability to snow and ice that is unique in North America.  The uniqueness is in the intersection of four factors:

• Rarity.  Like its rainbelt colleagues Portland and Vancouver, Seattle doesn't get snow and ice often enough to justify a huge investment in infrastructure to deal with it.  Obviously, cities with regular winter snow have the necessary equipment and staff, and also a public who are largely experienced with how winter weather affects transportation.  So life goes on in those places, and if you live on Ottawa or Minneapolis you may not be able to resist gloating over how Seattle collapses in weather that looks to you like a normal November day.   Rarity also explains why Seattle absorbs these occasional unpredictable shutdowns without serious harm to the economy.  On the bottom line, trying to function normally in snow just isn't worth the investment.
  
  (Having been raised in the Northwest rainbelt, I have a similar reaction whenever I happen to be in Los Angeles for the first big power-washing rainstorm of autumn, when all the drains are clogged with fallen leaves.  Again, it seems like nobody knows how to drive in partly flooded streets.  You might as well close the schools, stay home, and focus on defending your basement.)

• Temperature.  As in Portland and Vancouver, Seattle blizzard days are relatively warm as blizzards go.  In particular, it's common for the temperature to go above the freezing mark during the day but below it at night.  This causes snow to melt and refreeze as ice, which is generally the greater hazard.

• Rail transit.  Seattle doesn't have much, but the one line it has did well.  Seattle commentators are crowing about how well the Link light rail line fared in its first snowstorm.  In Vancouver, the new Canada Line didn't do so well; its bridge over the Fraser closed due to ice on the rails.  In general, though, rail systems do well in snow and ice, even on high viaducts where they're especially exposed to winter.  As I've argued at length, many of rail's advantages over buses are matters of cultural history rather than intrinisic features of the technologies.  But rail does seem to have an advantage on this point, though I welcome input from snowbelt readers who have more experience with rail-bus comparisons in other cities.
  
  
• Topography+density.  Portland and Vancouver share Seattle's basic climate, but both are  relatively flat if you think in population-adjusted terms.  Portland has steep hills, but apart from the Marquam Hill medical center they are mostly low-density, affecting only a small share of the population.  Vancouver has the scourge of major universities on remote promontories and hilltops, and the idea of a gondola to the hilltop fortress of Simon Fraser Univeristy may get a boost from the storm, but most of the city is on manageable grades.
  
  On the other hand, if you laid out a city with the specific goal of maximizing the amount of hill-climbing required for daily life, you coudn't do much worse than Seattle.  The city is full of steep hills with lots of important stuff up on top of them: dense housing and commercial as well as all the major medical centers.  (Seattle's founders knew in their bones that the medical arts simply cannot be practiced at sea level.) 
  
  This feature of Seattle, of course, is part of what makes it one of the most spectacular cities on earth, at least when the sun comes out.  In an article on cycling in Seattle, I suggested that the city needs to be understood as an archipelago: islands of pedestrian-friendly, bike-friendly, transit-friendly communities with big physical obstacles between them.  The same goes for mobility options in snow.  If you lived, say, in the flat part of Broadway in the center of Capitol Hill, you could probably slide around in your own neighborhood pretty safety, but to go anywhere else on the planet, you'd be looking at very steep hills.

So I would suggest folks go easy on the Seattle Department of Transportation, which is responsible for snow clearing, salting, etc.  (Full disclosure: SDOT is a former client of mine, and I do have friends there, but I haven't spoken with them since the storm.)  First of all, not even Minneapolis can deliver an incident-free evening rush hour when a winter storm hits at 4:00 PM, as it did in Seattle this year.  But more important, Seattle needs to relax into the futility of even attempting normal daily life in such a situation.  Adam Parast argues, intriguingly that rare snow days may be an opportunity for Seattle to rehearse life in a more resource-constrained future.  And as commenter Rob Fellows put it:

It seems that most people believe it's the city's responsibility to ensure that life goes on exactly as usual in a snow emergency. Metro has improved their snow response dramatically this year compared to two years ago, but is skewered in the press because an eighth of their fleet is sidelined and they don't have real time arrival tools that work on snow routes.

What I take away from it all isn't that it's futile to get around in snow in Seattle; it's that people here have no perspective! There are forces bigger than us on earth! There are more important things in life than our daily routine! For goodness sake, what a wonderful thing snow is - particularly because it makes us pause and take a moment to admire the wonder of nature at work.

 

seattle + snow = futility

Dear Seattle readers, if you still haven't figured out that you need to stay home, watch this.  Its a slice of life on John Street, Capitol Hill, Seattle, yesterday evening.

 

The transit angle on the story appears at 2:43.  Good thing nobody used the bike rack.

Stay home!

request for information: canadian ridership (updated)

Some colleagues and I have lately had occasion to compare public transit performance in young metro areas of 1-3 million, across North America and Australasia, and we've been turning up draft charts like this one (click to enlarge):

The x-axis is population, the y-axis is public transit trips per capita, per annum.  The red triangles are the Australian cities: Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney.  The purple circles are US cities: Honolulu, Portland, and Seattle.  The blue dots are Wellington and Auckland in New Zealand. 

But we're especially struck by the green dots, which represent Canada.  The four dots are Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, and all are at the top of this heap despite relatively low populations.  Even tiny Edmonton and Calgary are outperforming all the other cities studied, including Sydney and Melbourne. 

I've been asked to write a few paragraphs about why Canada's cities do so much better than very similar cities in the US or Australia/NZ.  I have my own speculations, but anyone with references or insights on this, please comment! 

UPDATE:  The consultant in charge of this project has reviewed the comments so far (Oct 8 0900 Sydney time) and observes:

 

Some rapid comments, having skimmed through the blog responses:

• Area boundaries. Always a problem. We have tried to cover the whole metro service areas in each case.  For SYD, this has meant including Newcastle and Wollongong etc, given the CityRail services extend to these areas. Similarly we have included Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast in the Brisbane figures.
  
  
• ** Linked v unlinked v return trips.  I doubt if this is a problem—we have aimed for unlinked trips (boardings) in all cases.
• ** Densities may well be one of the explanators of the differences, and we have estimates of these for the  North American metro areas (but not the Aus/NZ areas. I am reluctant to pursue these in more detail—as you well know, this is a minefield.

The whole topic would be good for a PhD—why has no done it already??

Good question!  More on this topic here!